


Crown of Crows and Windows.

by unfortunatesideeffects



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Body Horror, Brainwashing, Gen, Kidnapping, Love, M/M, Memory Loss, Possible Redemption, Trauma, Violence, grand rescues, very minor AoS spoilers if you squint
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-09-25
Updated: 2014-10-09
Packaged: 2018-02-18 18:04:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,083
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2357210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unfortunatesideeffects/pseuds/unfortunatesideeffects
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Shadow feathers stretch long across the wall, reaching dim and blurry fingers towards broken clerestory windows: this is a building long since abandoned to the rats and the pigeons. The bones of small, fragile things collect like drifts of seagrass in the corners and Bucky wonders again where he is. This place feels like a nowhere-space, like a city after the apocalypse has come then gone then left it far behind. </i>
</p><p>
  <i>Ok. Start at the beginning. What's hurt? What parts of you are in need of repair?</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part I.

He is standing by the head of a grave, just a single marker in a teeming field. Each one is the same – size, script, the coolness of the polished stone – and he feels like just one of many: grey, uniform, small as a dust-mote in the great wide plane that stretches on much further than his sniper-eyes can see, pale headstones eventually merging with distant mist in a blurry, uncertain horizon. _So many. I had not thought death had undone so many._ He doesn't know where he heard that, but it's very appropriate.He could be anyone in this endless green field; he could be nobody at all. There is nothing to distinguish his stone but the name and the dates, and from a distance even those blur into sameness. He searches his scrap-heap brain for a reference and when he finds none feels almost giddy; Bucky is a palimpsest. The feeling is such a relief that his shoulders sag with it.

 

There's something gleaming at his feet. Something he doesn't want to look at but cannot quite bring himself to avoid. The glitter of the thing niggles at the corner of his eye like the peeling edge of a scab, snagged on the inside of your jeans. He starts at the outer ends of it: mist beading against a silver skin, as innocuous as condensation on a glass – opposite, wires untangle outwards like the innards of some small bird, ravaged by hawks. But they are not intestine pink – they are red, and blue, and green, and yellow. Hard, ugly versions of essential colours. Pragmatic, serviceable, all the life drained out of them and replaced with purpose.

 

Surely, that must be a metaphor. This is not real life.

 

Bucky's eyes drag inwards, towards the centre of this macabre graveside offering. Along the brutal jointed digits, over the ridges and plates of knuckles, sinews, down to the indent of the palm. It's cold, blunt, hard, this object designed for grasping, ripping, bending, grinding; catching, holding, unrelenting. It is severed at the wrist, but even dismembered he eyes it as warily as a live grenade. No knowing what strange, unplumbable purpose they put in that thing; no telling of what it might be capable, with or without him. The hand lies still and damp against the dew-wet grass, one silvery finger grazing the surface of his headstone. Who put it there, he wonders? Here lies James Buchanan Barnes, and on his grave, a severed limb in place of flowers. Fitting tribute to the bloodshed that came after, once he was dead and reanimated by the will of this silvery parasite, infused with malicious and alien intent.

 

He doesn't want to touch it. He doesn't want to sully his remaining hand but – he bends like a concertina, folding down into a crescent curve, and reaches for the thing that killed him, cancerous and slow, dragged it out over near a hundred years so that when he woke, reborn as abruptly and vulnerably as he imagines it happened the first time around, he was barely alive enough to realise that he was free. The metal is slippery under his fingers, slick and wet and so, so cold. He closes his hand around with the same ginger delicacy as the rigged claw in a penny-arcade, anticipating explosions. And then Bucky waits, and waits, and the mist is starting to rise up from the ground around him, now, licking at his boots, tangling damp fingers into his hair. He feels his head drawn carefully back, too slow to startle him, too slow to realise before it's too late –

 

– the silver thing lunges from his hand, and Bucky is flung into the air, a buoyant, graceful burst of flight across the field of stones and roiling mist –

 

And then he falls; down towards the green dew-drenched grass, down towards the small hard stones – luminously blunt like so many scattered babies' teeth – down towards the mist which is opening its vaporous jaws wide to receive him, unhinged at the edges like a snake. Down into darkness, and piercing pain, and the feel of metal fingers grinding into the cartilage of his throat.

 

…

 

...He wakes. Gingerly. The nape of Bucky's neck is stickily damp, and when he shifts his head against the concrete, he feels the rough of it grate against a wound on the back of his skull. He did fall, then. Real after all.

 

Ok. Start at the beginning. What's hurt? What parts of you are in need of repair? He flexes the fingers on his right hand, rotates his wrist, shifts his elbow. When he reaches shoulder-high on one side, the other twitches in sympathy and he is abruptly, blindingly aware of it. Something is wrong – terribly, terribly wrong – and he realises then that the left side of his body is soaked and warm with sweat. He tries to touch his shoulder but – he has no hand. He has no arm. _He has no shoulder_ \- he can feel it, now, where the distal end of his collarbone lies bare and aching, a sense of unnatural exposure, his most precious internal structures pried open to the air. And the sweat soaking his shirt - that's not sweat. Now he's paying attention he can smell the raw-meat stench of himself on the frigid air, a salt-thick-red-wet-iron miasma rising around him, a cloying thing to taste on the roof of his mouth.

 

He does not know where he is. Something faint rustles in the middle-distance, and is replayed, many-layered and fading, as it ripples over hard, reflective surfaces. Beyond that he hears – nothing. His eyes have opened on half-light, the kind you get at three or four o'clock on a leaden day, in winter when the dark comes early. It's cold enough for that, too, and the silence outside has a leaden quality to it that could speak of whitewashed days frozen over beneath soft, thick clouds. It has that oppressive weight. When he inhales, beyond the warm stink of his own flesh Bucky can taste the unique and piercing chill of snow against the flat backs of his teeth, feel its crystalline shadow snaking into his nose and ears and burning at the corners of his eyes. He's definitely not dressed for the weather; through his thin t-shirt he can feel every dip and ridge and grain of grit on the concrete floor, pressing into his back. His jeans are a little better, but there's a hole in one knee and a draft whistles through it, raising goosflesh and hairs on the skin of his thigh.

 

Carefully, he levers himself up, curling his spine into a single parenthesis around the vulnerable skin of his stomach, knees folding in towards his chest. It's harder than you might imagine, with only one hand, opposite side of the body pivoting on an open wound. The muscles all down his left-most edge resist the stretch, painfully, and he groans and then regrets it as the sound echoes back to him in a hundred dying whimpers.

 

A trail of haphazard bootprints limp through the dust towards him, glistening wetly at the edges; just two feet, so, him. He came here under his own steam. Something has left an uneven drip-trail alongside, but Bucky – he can't think about that right now.

 

This space is as cavernous, and dimly grey as a rain-locked heath - about as inhospitable. He hears wings beating in the near distance, and is not comforted to discover that the birds seem as surprised by him as he is, by them; he must've been here a while, then, bleeding out onto the filthy floor. Shadow feathers stretch long across the wall, reaching dim and blurry fingers towards broken clerestory windows: this is a building long since abandoned to the rats and the pigeons. The bones of small, fragile things collect like drifts of seagrass in the corners and Bucky wonders again where he is. This place feels like a nowhere-space, like a city after the apocalypse has come then gone then left it far behind. The cement freezing into his palm feels oddly grounding, after that. He breaths and tries to focus on something smaller, and on trying to feel tangible. Easier imagined than achieved.

 

And unaided by reality. When Bucky looks down at his chest he sees something from a horror film. The dim light greys the gory rainbow of blood in various stages of coagulation: at the hem of his shirt the stuff is dry, flaking like rust from a wheel rim left out in the rain - but further up, where the life still bleeds sluggishly from the hole in his shoulder, the soft fabric is soaked in cheerful fire-engine red, glistening wet, dripping from the edge of his empty sleeve.

 

It's weird to see, that sleeve. Eerie, like coming home to find an unexpected light on in the window, a lizard-brain jolt of wrongness. He has never actually looked like an amputee before, never _literally_ observed himself in terms of negative space. His eyes see through to bloodstained concrete and bare air where he knows a limb has been, and he feels a jarring sense of recognition, the brutal collision of reality with a self-image that has for near a century been out of synch.

 

And Bucky feels his head spin, his eyes strain, trying instinctively to see an invisibly _present_ object, where in fact there is nothing, and where he has _felt_. _Nothing_. For such a very, very long time. He stares at the space for an indeterminate age, watching droplets of blood move down through empty air and splatter on the floor, trying to stop trying to paint in the simulacrum of an arm where there isn't one – and, really, hasn't been for years, in any way that matters. He stares until his neck starts to ache at the angle, and then stares a while longer besides – but the floor is hard and freezing cold, and his head really is starting to whirl, now, and some instinct gnaws through the dull haze of disbelief to tell him, finally, _you can't stay here_.

 

Can't stay here. But where will he go? Where is 'here', anyway? How did he get here, and what happened beforehand? Bucky is down an _entire limb_ , and the loss must've been relatively recent, because his body is still in shock, still bleeding from the site of erasure. Where did he lose it, anyway? A great, hulking metal arm of ambiguous provenance. You don't just 'misplace' a thing like that, tuck it into a shoebox under the bed or abandon it in a public skip. It's – something must've happened to it, it must _be somewhere_. He feels for his limb the way one might, almost, for another person, or a particularly vicious pet. It's not just an object you can cast off or dump at the tip; Bucky has always had a sense that if he threw his arm out the window of a moving car, it would just...gather its parts back together with terrible, aching precision, and drag its way home again, deposit itself on his doormat like some awful and slightly malicious house-cat bearing gifts of headless birds. It's probably irrational, he knows. It's an incredible piece of technology, but it's still just an arm, a prosthetic. It needs a breathing body to operate, lives only by the grace of electrical impulses and synthetic nerves. An arm is an arm, even when it's made of metal. It does not cognate; it cannot connive to do anything more complex than flex, reach, grasp, pull – make use of its myriad cogs and unnerving strength in the service of a master. It's a tool and Bucky knows that. He _knows_ –

 

But that's not how it feels, right now. That's not how it feels at all. Since the moment he woke up there's been a strange, deep throbbing in the centre of his chest, a flutter in the space between his lungs and beneath his sternum. It builds like a chorus of drums, rising to drown out everything else, setting what bones he has left a-rattle beneath his fragile skin.

 

And maybe that's not the arm, maybe that's just the product of a rough century's worth of half-glimpsed horror films and pulp fiction, looping his concussed brain like frantic sparrows in a cage, building panic to a fever-pitch – but Bucky has a feeling, deep in the cavern of his chest, and he knows, _knows_ , that his are not instincts to dismiss. Maybe it's not his lost, bodiless limb clawing its way through the filthy grey winter streets, honing in on his pain, his confusion, and the barest feather-touch of something light and glorious that hovered just for a moment at the back of his mind, the moment he had realised that the arm was truly gone; but _something_ is definitely coming for him. Something always is.

 

And the terror he feels as this thought coalesces is so gut-wrenchingly, brutally physical that it jars him to his feet in one awful, rolling stumble, and he staggers towards the warehouse door.

 

\-----

 

In a room far underground, in a city steeped in winter, snowed-under, distilled – somebody is unlocking a door. It's a heavy door, steel-reinforced, and it locks automatically on the close; no-one can get in.

 

No-one can get out.

 

 _Someone_ has a key. But they are not expecting what they find. The room is silvered with the dust of shattered glass – first broken and then ground beneath struggling, frantic boots. Blood like a Pollock painting dribbles down the walls, and silver instruments tumbled from their trays catch the light in crazy patterns. There's a body right by the door. One arm stretches out towards it and the fingers are clawed in a desperately hopeful way; a pair of forceps has been driven so deep into the man's back that only the handles protrude, a gruesome silver butterfly balanced in the centre of a sticky crimson stain.

 

Someone nudges the hand out of the way with a toe (pointed, black, lustrous). Glass crunches beneath well-cut heels until they stop beside a the wheeled feet of a medical trolley. Miraculous it stands, untouched in a wasteland of crumpled lab-coats, bowed metal, gnarled bodies. Its silvery tray is washed with blood, dried now, flaking, clinging to the sides, to the trailing wires and the thing that lies – so strikingly quiescent! – within. One finger has been wrenched off, and it sits slightly apart, curled in on itself like an ugly, bulbous caterpillar. Interesting how something so beautiful, so lethal when entire can be so awkward broken down to its component parts.

 

The rest of it, though – the rest is still viciously, perfectly whole.

 

Someone lifts the arm; they slide gentle gloved fingers beneath biceps and wrist, tug a little when the congealed gore sticks. The arm goes into a stiff black bag, the bag is closed, a key once again applied to that heavy, impenetrable door. In a few days the corpses will begin to rot – even down here, even in this city as cold as Hell's ninth circle – and by then perhaps S.H.I.E.L.D. will have noticed that it's missing something. Twisted as they are, ripped apart, barely human, it's obvious that this massacre is one body short. His bloody fingerprints will be all over this mess and they're not stupid, S.H.I.E.L.D.; they'll draw all the logical conclusions.

 

It won't matter, though. There's a team waiting out in the snow, they're armed with tracking dogs and tranq guns, and they'll find him before S.H.I.E.L.D. even gets a jet off the ground. Perhaps they underestimated, once, just how much of the soldier was the man, not the arm – but not twice. This time they'll lock him down tight so deep, and so cold, that he'll never be able to claw himself free. This time they'll take more than the arm.


	2. Part II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Steve had practised restraint, the benefit of the doubt, etc. and so-forth, in an effort not to be the mother of all hens; and now here he is, 24 hours later, standing in the middle of Bucky's war-zone apartment – that always looks a little like Kansas after the tornado, but never like it is genuinely on the verge of spontaneous and absolute combustion – and trying not to pull out handfuls of scalp along with his hair._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Unbetaed because I'm bad at waiting right now - all awkwardness and mistakes are mine (I should really stop posting things like this).

The street outside is clogged with snow. It covers everything – sidewalks, postbox, gutters, signposts – and the roofs of warehouses that stretch further than he can crane his head to see. There's been no effort made to clear the road. The surface glitters unbroken beneath a sky as grey as a mourning dove, except for the meandering mess of footprints coming towards him, tinting the white drifts red – that no-one's found himself is luck, dumb and dangerous, and it's terrifying to imagine himself fucked up enough to leave this gory map for any would-be pursuers. He looks up and down the empty street, but – _soon_ , whispers ghostly in the back of his mind, _soon_. _They will be here, soon. C_ hill anticipation licks up his spine, but his arm-less-ness has unbalanced him. He has unlearned the difference between _fight_ and _flight_ ; he only knows that his blood crackles with _something_ , and hopes that soon a turning point will come.

 

Industrial buildings crowd in on all sides; high walls and doors large enough to accommodate a freight truck, they are made of corrugated iron, and wood, and concrete blocks. Their windows – glassed and empty, prisoners behind mesh grids, steel bars, old floorboards – seem to track his progress with antipathetic distrust. This is not a friendly place to be lost, in winter and without a coat, no phone, and the snow creeping in through the holes in his boots.

 

Bucky shivers and jams his fingers into his pocket, deep as they'll go. They brush the edge of a piece of paper worn soft with creases and too much handling. He recognises it suddenly, all in a rush remembers -

 

_\- That lopsided, wicked-but-it'll-fool-you-sweet smile Steve smiled, up from underneath his lashes. He was golden in the sun streaming through the window, on a summer afternoon, in Brooklyn, so many years after the war._

 

“ _What're you drawin', then?”_

 

“ _Just drawing.”_

 

_Bucky leant back against the windowsill, craning to get a look. He caught dark birds-nest hair, the crinkle at the corner of an eye, “Me?”_

 

“ _Not everything's about you, Buck,” Steve tilted the book up, hiding his lines._

 

“ _Nah,” Bucky's shrug was deceptively easily; he ucked his hands into his pockets, grinned his most charming, disarming grin; the lopsided one, lupine at the edges, just a few too many teeth. Steve liked that grin. He knew it, deep down in his belly, “But most things are.”_

 

_Steve shook his golden head and laughed – not at up at Bucky (he regrets this immediately) but down at his work, tapped his page with his pencil, “Humble, aren't we.”_

 

_Some part of him that lives in his chest felt like it had just stepped into the shade; un-looked-at, it felt loss. Bucky trampled it, ruthlessly. Put on his most – of many – nonchalant voice,“'Humble'? Sound's boring – we both know I ain't that.”_

 

_And Steve looked up at him, sun glinting in those blue eyes and turning the blond lashes translucent; Bucky felt the air change around him, a crackle of static creeping up his spine to set the short hairs at his nape on end. If he touched Steve now a spark would sting his fingers. The drawing had become a cipher, and Bucky was no longer sure he wished to see what codes it might break. What lay between them seemed safer as an enigma._

 

“ _It would be,” Steve told him, and he was quiet about it but there was an urgency there, now, buried deep but fighting its way to the surface, “It_ would _be boring.” And Bucky looked away because –_

 

– _Because it frightened him, that edge of some imminent and catastrophic reveal, a thing between the two of them that might – at any moment, if only one of them was careless, if Steve dared for a moment to be plain – tumble right out of their secret unshared past and into the bare, unfeeling daylight of this raw new century. It was impossible, to hold Steve's eyes when they looked at him that way, like some miraculous thing, unnerving and wondrous in its reality – it was the way you looked at something that you wanted desperately to touch and knew you shouldn't, couldn't, never might. For Bucky it was painful, to watch as Steve brightened like a warming globe, plugged back into the whole wide world because just one person he'd thought lost had let himself be found again; it was even more painful to see him dim again, when Bucky turned away._

 

_What Steve didn't know – what he couldn't understand was that – that it was awful, that look; it knotted up Bucky's insides like tangled rope, and squeezed tight around his heart. What was a guy supposed to do with a look like that, if he couldn't do the obvious? If he couldn't – if there was space in him, where his ribs cage around, and it was cold and dark and full of vicious, viscous voices that he did not remember hearing, calling him by names he'd never owned, and could not bare to recognise? If there were layers in his black-ice heart from years of erasure and mutilation, and each one had been compressed by those that came after 'til the innermost surfaces – those closest to the still-red core of him, which beat yet with some sort of life, though sluggishly – had become hard as adamant distilled from coal?_

 

 _And the most frightening part was this: what if he never got over those years spent clawing at his own skull from the inside, leaving deep grooves in the bone, the scars of a wild animal gnawing off its own left paw? Years of forgetting and re-making and unravelling at every corner...his stomach sickened at the look on Steve's face, because it was too hideous – to be looked at the way Steve was looking, and to know that – after all the years when he was locked inside his own head like a sane man shut into a prison asylum, and then the years that came after, when he was given the key but, too used to his own cage, could never seem quite to shut the door behind him – after all that, what if he was never able to look back? He wanted to scream and rage and tear at his hair, because after_ everything _they'd taken from him, this seemed like the scale-tipping straw. To be looked at in that way, by that man, and unable to lift his own eyes._

 

 _On that summer afternoon in Steve's sunlit Brooklyn apartment, Steve saw it. Of course he saw it, Steve sees everything. His face shut down like a house closing up in the face oncoming storm – that's what you do when you stand in the path of a force of nature too vast to be outrun, too all-encompassing to fight. He smiled just a bit, that other sort of smile – the one he did for tourists, and ladies who tried to slip a hand around his biceps, measuring the worth of him by weight like a sous-chef at the butcher's. It was his don't-look-at-me smile, I'm-not-so-special (but he was, he_ was _, and Bucky_ wanted _to look, the wanting made his throat ache, it made his ribs feel too tight for his chest)._

 

“ _Don't worry about it,” Steve's voice twitched him back into the real world like a fish on a line, “I just meant – hey, what're you doing this weekend? I saw this poster for a new retro movie house -”_

 

_They made plans, they talked about other things. But weeks later Bucky sought out the sketchbook, unattended, and like a thief he stole into its pages and tore one, carefully, right down to the binding so that from the outside the loss would be all but invisible. And he folded it into his pocket, touched it like a talisman, proof that he was present. He was seen. Even if he could not look back -_

 

\- If he opened the page now, here, in the middle of the street, there wouldn't be much to it. He's folded and unfolded the paper so many times that the lines have faded out to grey, smudged into fog at the edges. But in the dark of his own mind Bucky can still see what had been there: his own eyes, but not as he saw them – as Steve saw them, a whole world of difference. And maybe it was just wishful thinking, on Steve's part, but Bucky saw – he thought he saw a hint of it. Some kind of spark of soul, or the tick-tick-tick of a human heart. They say that these things _can_ be seen, at times – by special people, by artists – that if the right person observes the eye in just the right way they can see right in through the cornea, through the lens, traverse the soft shadows of the vitreous body to what lies deep within, visit that part of a flesh-blood-bone(-metal-gears-cables-chips) human which turns them into _people_ and not parts. They can bring it back with them. Translate it into graphite on a page. Bucky thinks he saw a glimpse of that in Steve's drawing, once. He hopes he did.

 

In a winter street in a strange city, unremembered hours and miles between him and New York, Bucky feels a phantom hand on the back of his neck, and he shivers right down to his boots.

 

~*~

Steve waits a whole twenty-four hours before he starts freaking out because, in the matter of one James Buchanan Barnes, former Hydra asset and bane of his goddamn existence for the past ninety-something years, he is trying to learn restraint. As in, _'you gotta learn some restraint, Steve. He's trying to figure out how to be a normal human being. You can't go callin' him every five minutes like the mother of all hens – he's a grown-ass man. Sometimes he's gonna decide not to return all his messages.'_ And that was right, it was valid, they were three years out from the Soviet-era bomb shelter where they'd found him, battered, bloody, snarling like an animal (and that was six months after the Hellicarrier, when Steve's whole world had started to fall to pieces and into place, with devastating simultaneity); Bucky had every right to be treated like a proper human being – and wasn't that what Steve wanted for him anyway?

 

So Steve had practised restraint, the benefit of the doubt, etc. and so-forth, in an effort _not_ to be the mother of all hens; and now here he is, 24 hours later, standing in the middle of Bucky's war-zone apartment – that always looks a little like Kansas after the tornado, but never like it is genuinely on the verge of spontaneous and absolute combustion – and trying not to pull out handfuls of scalp along with his hair.

 

Steve takes five deep breaths, closes his two tired eyes, carefully and painfully unclenches each one of his eight fingers and two thumbs and lets his hands hang for a moment by his sides. Then – instead of breaking something or collapsing like a kit house in an earthquake – he does the smart thing, and pulls out his phone.

 

“So? What's his excuse this time?”

 

For a moment, Steve fumbles for a few right words to describe the enormity of that question, and its terrifyingly ambiguous answer – and then he doesn't have to, because Natasha's ability to grasp at the true meaning of things in absolute silence frankly borders on the arcane.

 

“Right. He's gone. You're at his place, obviously – give me five, I'm coming to you. Tell me the basics while I drive.”

 

Relief, Steve has discovered, feels a little bit like blood-loss; adrenaline rushing out like a low tide in fast-forward, the subsequent dizziness and shaking. He fumbles his way to the torn-up couch, retrieves a cushion from the floor to sit on and tries not to let the gratitude creep too obviously into his voice.

 

“We had – plans. Yesterday. Nothin' special, just a picnic, maybe a movie after. We were gonna watch the model sialboats and throw bread at the ducks – you know, boring, nice. Normal, it was all...normal. He was running late – he's always late, but you know that, of course you know that, dammit, sorry – he called me just as he was about to leave. Said he was just grabbing his coat –” Steve looks at the front door instinctively and his heart beats up into his throat, strangles him for a moment as he gazes at the soft green peacoat hanging quietly on its, an incongruous morsel of stillness and banality in the midst of the chaos, “It's still here. They must've -” he's tugging at his hair again, but he can't summon the will to make himself stop, “Someone must've grabbed him right after we talked, Nat. When you see his place, you'll – it's completely trashed.” He has to stop for a moment, after that, because the reality of it – the blue-green shards of a vintage lamp ground into gravel against the polished concrete floor, yesterday's paper and bills and envelopes swept into a drift across the rug, the bootprints on the coffee-table, a pool of cold tea in the kitchen, the pieces of a teacup rising out of it like tiny leaf-patterned islands, the great big bed in the corner spilling over with feathers from pillows shredded to ribbon-thin scraps – Bucky loves his apartment. Everything in it he chose himself, found and bought and wrangled home _himself_. He poured himself into tuning an echoing warehouse convert into a place that felt like home, like safety, and a haven from the rush and noise of a city he loves, but which doesn't always love him back.

 

Steve feels his heart in his throat again. He thinks of Bucky, bright-eyed and fierce, telling him he _could do this, alright? I'm not fuckin' five, Steve – I can live on my own. Just 'cause we – just 'caus I haven't, before, doesn't mean I can't. It's a brave new world, Stevie. We all gotta try new things, right?_ And the long process of looking for _the right place_ (which meant: high but not too high to jump out the window if he had to, good lines of sight to the street and neighbours, solid walls, new door locks, at least three conventional exits). With a shudder, Steve remembers the month-long email fight Bucky'd had with his landlord to get a Stark security system installed. Again he looks at the door. He wonders how on earth they got in. And worse – how they got out again.

 

Down the line he hears the blur of noon traffic in Brooklyn, the tap of Natasha's fingers against the wheel, a fast break, muted horn honking and muttered curses in Russian and French. He swallows his heart back down into his chest, but he can't slow its frantic pace.

 

“I don't -” his voice is rough around the edges, “I don't wanna think about what state he musta been in, Nat. To let 'em take him like this. He put up a fight, but they obviously won. How'd they get him out, in the middle of the day, in the middle of Brooklyn, without anybody noticing?”

 

“Unconscious, I'd guess,” says Nat, as the phonecall ends. Steve looks up and she's standing in the doorway, surveying the wreckage. She whistles low, then meets his eye. “Ok, well,” she puts a hand on his shoulder as she picks her way across the living room, squeezes gently for just a moment, “I think you should suck it up and call Coulson, now,” her voice carries back to him over her shoulder as she heads down the little hallway to the spare room, the bathroom – places Steve hadn't yet worked up the nerve to check, too overwhelmed with images of blood splattered on the clean white tiles he'd helped lay down, “He's going to want to know that someone's kidnapping S.H.I.E.L.D.'s associates, and frankly, I think we're going to want his resources. Only someone with balls for brains and a lot of clout would go after the Winter Soldier, even if he is retired,” she pokes her head back out of the bathroom, and though she sounds almost flippant, her eyes are sharp and deadly serious, “Since their mission was obviously a success, I guess we can assume they didn't overestimate their abilities.”

 

Steve looks around at the living room – its shattered thrift-store lamps, the records tumbled carelessly across the floor like dropped playing-cards, the pillows slashed and bleeding stuffing and feathers, every kitchen cupboard gaping wide, showing metal pots, and mismatched china, and rows of cans like dully patterned teeth. They've left the pictures alone, mostly – the backing's been ripped off a couple of [ironic WWII propaganda posters](http://iamshadow21.tumblr.com/post/99433159696/paperflower86-from-the-archives-of-the) (most of featuring Steve), and the giant [Lewis Hine photo](http://ilmuromag.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2013/04/Empire_State_Bldg_by_Hine_2.jpg) – workers taking a lunch break, miles up in the New York sky as they put the Empire State Building together, piece by piece – has half-fallen so it balances on one corner, propped against the wall. The [Rothko print](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/08/RothkoBlackGray.jpg) Bucky bought, two years ago, in an apparently random response to a therapist's question about the state of his brain is still hung on the wall by the fridge. He said he hadn't been able to figure out words that meant ' _rage_ ' and ' _emptiness_ ' and ' _why_ ' and ' _God_ ' in quite the right combination or degree; he'd said the painting felt like that. And [the Miró](http://joanmiro.co.uk/Oro%20dell%20Azzurro%20Joan%20Miro.jpg) – a year later, because of Steve this time, making him laugh; on a Sunday, kicking off their shoes on the beach at Cony Island, forgetting all the hard things for just one bright afternoon – Bucky had said he didn't understand why, but it made him feel like there was something to the world, after all, and he could touch it – still vast, but the opposite of an uncaring universe (and, really, Steve couldn't think of a better way to understand art than by feeling something for it) – the _Miró_ glows with incongruous joy in the reflected light of the afternoon sun.

 

The home Bucky has built for himself is not the one Steve would have expected from the man he'd known in '43 - but then, it wouldn't be, would it? Because Bucky-who-had-been-the-Winter-Soldier, who still has the Soldier curled inside of him, deep down somewhere, a slumbering serpent that could wake at any moment (to set the world on fire or sink its fangs deep into the soft flesh of its host, dealer's choice) – he's not the same man Steve had gone to war with, the same way _that_ Bucky had not been the Bucky who left for war, and he in turn had been a different man to the one who'd laughed and joked and worked hard and ribbed Steve for his patriotism and white knight-ery, before that letter came in the mail, the coolly worded bi-product of a lucky draw that had changed both their lives.

 

When they'd grown up in Brooklyn (the first time around) they'd been broke, and cold, and closer than brothers. In their pocket-sized apartment – with the cracks and the whistling window frames, and the walls so thin they could hear Lucy next door reading _The Wizard of Oz_ to her bedridden grandma in her high-pitched, lisping warble; and Annie and Jack upstairs, going at it like rabbits in the middle of the day – Bucky had slouched against door jamb and let Steve take care of what meagre decorating they could manage. Mostly, that meant Steve's art on the walls; the sketches for old commissions, and the finished pieces he always meant to try to sell, but would – Bucky's hand on his arm, the brush of fingers across the back of his neck while he bent over their rickety kitchen table, ' _Hey, that's kinda beautiful, Steve. How'd you think of that, anyway?_ ' – conveniently forget to tuck into his portfolio. When he thinks about it, Steve can see the echo of those drawings Bucky liked in some of the art he's chosen for his home. Hine's workers, Miro's whimsical inky-black lines. The propaganda posters are a joke, obviously – and the Rothko...Steve doesn't know what to make of the Rothko. He stars into it's velvet blackness and thinks of Bucky, of what goes on behind his eyes, in the dark of his sealed-in skull – and he thinks of the Winter Soldier, and shivers at the feel of midnights grown so thick that you can touch them like a shroud, and the breath of incipient frost on the back of your neck, raising the hairs there like static electricity.

 

He can see, when he looks at it properly, in the absence of its master, how this apartment makes sense of Bucky. Of where he's come from, but also of that gaping space between then and now, of the Lost Years that seemed to seep into everything he touches, even three years on. But there's nothing here that Steve has drawn. Bucky, he realises abruptly, has made a whole new space for himself with no tangible reference to Steve. Oh, he'd helped – of course he'd helped – with the move, and painting walls, and rearranging furniture. What extra hands had been required, Steve had provided – willingly, pre-emptively even. He'd been part of it. His fingerprints must be all over this place.

 

But as he looks around at the wreckage of the one solid thing Bucky has built for himself Steve feels something crack in his chest, an ache spreading out to fill the space around his lungs and heart; because if he were a stranger walking into Bucky's life, he would never know that Steve existed. While Steve's apartment is littered with sketches and notebooks and forgotten clothes, lent books, borrowed records, films, an umbrella, cds – all of them of or belonging to or about _Bucky_ – Steve, apparently, has left no tangible trace. And he doesn't know why.

 

He's never realised it before.

 

He's never noticed his own absence before because _he'd always been there_ , in person, and _Bucky_ had been there, and wherever Bucky is, Steve sees himself – an echo, a shadow of shared history and a past that spans near a century – myriad microscopic threads binding them together, and he _feels_ them, always; he feels them even now, when Bucky is so far out of his reach he might as well be on the Moon.

 

But he realises – abruptly and horribly, like the snap-pain shock of a bullet-wound, which, in the split of a second, can break something that was, just a moment before, perfect and whole – that he has no idea if _Bucky_ feels those strings. He's never asked. He'd assumed, from the moment Bucky pressed his palms and forehead against the bullet-proof glass of his containment cell and whispered Steve's name, that _that_ , at least, was right between them. The world – _everything_ – had changed, but not that. Fundamentally, they are bound together. They fit.

 

And now he stands alone in this apartment, with Bucky – this new Bucky – writ all over it, and himself nowhere to be found, and he feels more lost and broken than he had when he'd woken the 21st century and they'd told him everyone he loved was either dying, or dead. Bucky has carved a new place for himself, and he's cut Steve out of it – and now Bucky's missing and he can't even ask why.

 

A door closes down the hall, and he hears Natasha's coat swish. She pauses in the doorway, surveying the carnage once more; when she turns her eyes to Steve, she looks him over in much the same way. Assessing the damage. Checking for structural cracks.

 

“I'm done here, but I'm not cleaning this shit up, and you can't keep sitting there looking like someone just cancelled Christmas. Sam's expecting us. You ok?”

 

Steve had woken this morning from rough, dark dreams feeling drained, like his pre-serum body had crept up on him in the night and slid back beneath his skin – but he'd known what was really wrong. He'd known it in his sleep, and felt it more with every missed call, every unanswered message, every hour when nobody knocked on his door. Now, mixed in with the unsettled, wrong-skin feeling is an emptiness that seems to have seeped into his knuckles and shoulders and every vertebrae in his spine. It waits there, aching and wanting; he doesn't need to be a rocket scientist to figure out what he's missing, or why it hurt so much.

 

He looks at the Rothko one more time; Steve thinks he may get it a little better, now. The soft, cool emptiness of it, the way the paint seems to melt into an infinite shadow-space, somewhere you could get lost in, and forget. But he's less sure, now, of what it is that _Bucky_ sees, when he looks at the painting. That earthquake feeling is stronger, now. Nothing he'd been certain of yesterday seems clear anymore – well, just one thing. It feels like the focus of his entire world has narrowed to one solitary point, a mess of too-long dark hair, and blue eyes that watch him and flicker between wariness and love – he's always assumed that it's love, deep down. Somewhere – faster than even he can follow. He has to get that back, at least. He has to see Bucky back here, in his own space, in this apartment where he is as vulnerable and open as he ever is – perhaps as he is capable of being, now, with so many things jagged and healed strange inside of him - and figure out where they stand. More than that he needs Bucky safe again, in a relative sense. Whatever Steve may be to him, Bucky is his...what? The only person he's loved whose survived the 21st century. He can't lose that. And he won't let Bucky lose himself. They both fought so hard to get him back in the first place...

 

“I'm fine,” as lies go, it's blindingly obvious – but Natasha can be kind, when she needs to be, “Let's go.” He stands up. He's still clutching his phone, and his fingers are wrapped so tightly around it now that only Stark's super-proof technology has saved its inner workings. He's stared at it so often and so blankly today, that for a moment he doesn't even register that the screen is flashing at him. An unknown number. An area code from somewhere that is definitely not New York.

 

 

He scrambles to answer so fast he almost drops the thing.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A note on dates:  
> According to the Marvel movies wiki, Bucky volunteered for the army right after America declared war (December 1941) – in my version he's conscripted, instead, because (for a lot of reasons) I think that makes more sense for his character – either way, the draft ran from 1940-73, so it doesn't change the official timeline. I don't know anything much about the military, but I guess it takes a couple of months to prepare to ship out, so I'm going to say he went to England around mid 1942. He was captured by Hydra a year later, in 1943, and a little less than a month later Steve swooped in and rescued them all. The Marvel movies wiki says the Howling Commandos ran missions for 'several months' before the Horrible Train Incident, and 'several' being a lovely, specific number I'm going to guess so I guess he fell around December 1943 (which also works with all the snow!).
> 
>  
> 
> Ps: I am sorry this took longer than promised. I am terrible, and the last few weeks have been _very long_. I will try to do better.
> 
> Ps: my favourite time to edit things is, apparently, after I've posted them. So, I apologise, y'all. Readers in the first 24 hours are lab rats. I'm sorry.

**Author's Note:**

> This is...turning out to be a lot longer than I anticipated. I was thinking maybe 3 neat chapters - ha, ha. Nice try, my friend.
> 
> I'm fascinated by Bucky's relationship with his arm, and particularly by that moment when he woke up - you know, that horrifying flashback in CA:TWS when he lifts his hands in front of his face, and one is metal? - that feeling of something being very, very wrong in your own body. Something being where it shouldn't be, the invasiveness of it, the cold that gets right into your stomach.
> 
> So, naturally, I wanted to play with what would happen if he woke up _without_ it. Is that any less horrifying? Not to mention all the memory stuff... Poor Buck. He just has so many traumatic corners to explore.
> 
> And then we'll add Steve into the mix, and get some Feelings in there as well. It's gonna be grand (well, at least for me).
> 
>  
> 
> Hope you enjoyed (is enjoyment the right sentiment to hope for, here? Found something interesting, anyway). Next chapter up next week!
> 
>  
> 
> And I'm still [unfortunatesideeffects on tumblr](http://unfortunatesideeffects.tumblr.com/), because that's a thing people include here.


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